100%: the Story of a Patriot eBook

Then, paying no attention to Peter’s wailings,
he took him by the back of the collar and marched
him down the hall again, and turned him over to one
of the policemen. “Take this man to the
city jail,” he said, “and put him in the
hole, and keep him there until I come, and don’t
let him speak a word to anybody. If he tries it,
mash his mouth for him.” So the policeman
took poor sobbing Peter by the arm and marched him
out of the building.

Section 5

The police had got the crowds driven back by now,
and had ropes across the street to hold them, and
inside the roped space were several ambulances and
a couple of patrol-wagons. Peter was shoved into
one of these latter, and a policeman sat by his side,
and the bell clanged, and the patrol-wagon forced
its way slowly thru the struggling crowd. Half
an hour later they arrived at the huge stone jail,
and Peter was marched inside. There were no formalities,
they did not enter Peter on the books, or take his
name or his finger prints; some higher power had spoken,
and Peter’s fate was already determined.
He was taken into an elevator, and down into a basement,
and then down a flight of stone steps into a deeper
basement, and there was an iron door with a tiny slit
an inch wide and six inches long near the top.
This was the “hole,” and the door was opened
and Peter shoved inside into utter darkness.
The door banged, and the bolts rattled; and then silence.
Peter sank upon a cold stone floor, a bundle of abject
and hideous misery.

These events had happened with such terrifying rapidity
that Peter Gudge had hardly time to keep track of
them. But now he had plenty of time, he had nothing
but time. He could think the whole thing out,
and realize the ghastly trick which fate had played
upon him. He lay there, and time passed; he had
no way of measuring it, no idea whether it was hours
or days. It was cold and clammy in the stone
cell; they called it the “cooler,” and
used it to reduce the temperature of the violent and
intractable. It was a trouble-saving device;
they just left the man there and forgot him, and his
own tormented mind did the rest.

And surely no more tormented mind than the mind of
Peter Gudge had ever been put in that black hole.
It was the more terrible, because so utterly undeserved,
so preposterous. For such a thing to happen to
him, Peter Gudge, of all people—­who took
such pains to avoid discomfort in life, who was always
ready to oblige anybody, to do anything he was told
to do, so as to have’an easy time, a sufficiency
of food, and a warm corner to crawl into! What
could have persuaded fate to pick him for the victim
of this cruel prank; to put him into this position,
where he could not avoid suffering, no matter what
he did? They wanted him to tell something, and
Peter would have been perfectly willing to tell anything—­but
how could he tell it when he did not know it?